Refractions on Leadership, Love and AI

Refraction, /r??frakSH(?)n/: ?is?the bending of light (or any wave) as it passes from one medium to another.?

How do we connect the dots between love, leadership and the emergence of AI in stressful times of change and disruption?

Could AI, a gathering storm of accelerating change, paradoxically help us up the ante on love?? In this piece, I retell a story from years ago about how love appeared as a “four-letter-word” in my professional life, briefly explore some edges of what AI may mean for us and share the perspectives of some of our more renown ancestors who delivered love during impossible times of hardship and change.? I conclude with calling us in to bring love to the unknowns and questions with which we are living today.

As the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. explained, “there is no word in the English language more familiar than the word ‘love….’? And… it is one of the most misunderstood words.”? In our competitive, complex and polarized world, love remains a decidedly four-letter word in many of our leadership environments today.? In the face of increasing conflict in virtually all of our human and more-than-human systems, can we afford to continue to marginalize love??

Three decades ago, I applied for a job with a new business trade association called Business for Social Responsibility.? The organization was just getting started in San Francisco with a vision of “of business as a force for positive social change—a force that would preserve and restore natural resources, ensure human dignity and fairness, and operate transparently.”? If hired, I would have been the third employee in the office.? When I interviewed with the CEO, I had one of those moments that I’ll always remember.? After some light conversation, the CEO asked me in a more serious way:? “So Doug, what do you care about most in life?”? It was not a question for which I had prepared or, really, ever considered.? It was one of those moments when time stood still.? Surprisingly, I instantly knew the answer, even if I had no idea what I meant by my answer.? Just as quickly, I knew it was not the kind of answer he was looking for.? Feeling curiously bold and perhaps a bit reckless by the swiftness of my comprehension in the moment, I responded, simply, “love.”? I can still see the look on his face, of discomfort, concern and, perhaps, a little wonder.?

Though I wasn’t his first choice, I did ultimately get the job when another candidate passed on the offer.? Months later, when I knew him better, I asked him about that interview moment.? He smiled and confessed, “it made me nervous.”? He was building an organization to bring social responsibility into the mainstream of business, so the language and professionalism of the team was important.? In recalling this hiring story with my former boss decades later, he explained, “I wish back then I was able to embrace your answer.? Today, we’re more closely aligned.”? When asked about his current coaching and mentoring work he explained, “I (now) say the arc of my life has been about knowing myself, understanding my gifts, sharing my gifts with generosity and giving and receiving love.”? He is a brilliant man. I am grateful to have been mentored by him. He demonstrates the light and wisdom of an elder, a perspective that can seem in remarkably short supply in our modern world.? The need to engage our lives and relations with love seems more important than ever.? While I may have been bold (or just foolish) in using that four-letter word in a job interview, it didn’t mean I knew how to live into love, or how it applies in our present moment.

As AI is looming on the horizon of change in a world already mired in distress and uncertainty, I was intrigued to read how New York Times guest writers Aneesh Raman?and?Maria Flynn considered the big questions of what AI could mean for how we educate human beings, without naming love explicitly.

A.I…. should compel us to think differently about ourselves as a species.? Our abilities to effectively communicate, develop empathy and think critically have allowed humans to collaborate, innovate and adapt for millenniums.? Those skills are ones we all possess and can improve, yet they have never been properly valued in our economy or prioritized in our education and training.? That needs to change. (February 14, 2024)

Raman and Flynn go on to quote Minouche Shafik, the former President of Columbia University:? “In the past, jobs were about muscles.? Now they’re about brains, but in the future, they’ll be about the heart.”? Alas, the challenge of bringing our hearts isn’t a new one.

There are those precious ones who came before us who provide a good model for how to think about love and leadership under dire conditions.? George Washington Carver was born into slavery in Diamond, Missouri during the civil war.? Against enormous odds, he received his MA in 1896 and was known as a botanist, scientist, chemist and inventor.? He was famous for creating over 100 products made out of peanuts, as he sought to help poor Black farmers coming out of slavery find a sustainable alternative crop to cotton.? What stands out for me was his approach to his work and life.? People would bring him their difficulties with plants and crops, which he could cure and help flourish in a way that amazed people.? When asked about how he did this, his response was:

Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough.? Not only have I found that when I talk to the little flower or to the little peanut they will give up their secrets, but I have found that when I silently commune with people they give up their secrets also, when, you love them enough

How is it that a man who was kidnapped as an infant—sold in Kentucky and returned not to his parents, but the people who owned his parents—could bring such a loving and respectful response to life.? (Outrage and/or despair could well have been a rather logical response.)? Another quote for which he is famous:

How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong.? Because someday in your life you will have been all of these.

The life of George Washington Carver is a remarkable and wise example for us today of being an elder.? We can also recall the wisdom of Dr. King (1963), from the book he had in his briefcase the day he was assassinated.? "Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that.? Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that" (Strength to Love, 1963).?

What is the call for leadership during these times, and how does love fit in today?? How is it that we lose sight of the role of love in our most important endeavors, right when we might need it the most?? Joanna Macy, another rare modern-day elder, calls us into what she describes as “The Great Turning.”? She says, echoing King’s insight, “If we fight climate change, then we’re?sunk” (Tami Simon, Sounds True, 2024).? Instead, we will need to navigate this crisis through love.? As Rilke, often quoted by Macy, explains in his famous passage, Love the Questions:

I beg us… to have patience with everything unresolved in our hearts and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.? Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to us now, because we would not be able to live them.? And the point is, to live everything.? Live the questions now!? Perhaps then, someday in the future, we will gradually, without ever noticing it, live our way into the answers. - Rainer Maria Rilke (adapted slightly to the plural)

What is the next step in your own practice of love and leadership?? How might love be in service of our most intractable challenges?? As spiritual teacher Patrick Connor remarked recently, “In the end, only love works.”? He asks us, “what vibration do we want to bring to this world?”? bell hooks, the late American author and revolutionary thinker explained, "It is essential… that we speak of love. ?For love is the necessary?foundation enabling us to survive the wars, the hardships, the sickness, and the dying with our?spirits intact. ?It is love that allows us to survive whole.”

Might AI, which may be able to do everything but love, be an unwitting catalyst that requires us to step up and into our hearts?? How might we, in the throes of our adaptive challenges, “love enough?”?

We circle back to the challenge of defining love.? As Maria Popova articulates it in her remarkable newsletter The Marginalian,

Somewhere along the way of life, we learn that love means very different things to different people, and yet all personal love is but a fractal of a larger universal love. Some call it God. I call it wonder… [and] Because the capacity for love may be the crowning achievement of consciousness and consciousness the crowning achievement of the universe, because the mystery of the universe will always exceed the reach of the consciousness forged by that mystery, love in the largest sense is a matter of active surrender… to the mystery.? It may be that we are only here to learn how to love.

May we find ourselves this fall, exploring and leaning into the vibration of love.